Still Life with Mother and Knife
by Chelsea Rathburn
(LSU Press, 2019, 84 pp. $18.95)
I pre-ordered Chelsea Rathburn’s Still Life with Mother and Knife after reading two of the poems that would be in it and falling in love with the way Rathburn uses words. She lays them naked in front of us like an artist’s model, and we sketch or sculpt to catch them in our minds the best we can. When we see them again, they’ve moved ever so slightly, or we have, and we find some new angle to explore and try to understand.